| Sumario: | The article focuses on the Russian novels "Eugene Onegin" and Dead Souls." It is argued that the development of the Russian novel may be divided, schematically but not wholly inappropriately, into three stages. The third and final stage is that of the great proliferation of Russian novelists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The initial stage sees the intermittent appearance, from the mid-eighteenth century, of novels which, though written in Russian, can scarcely be described as Russian novels: novels with titles like "The Adventures of Achilles," "Milord George," or "The Russian Pamela." The second and transitional period, between the novels in Russian and the age of great Russian novelists, is that of the earliest major Russian novels. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time," and Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol's "DeadSouts" are all "oneoff" experiments in form and genre. There is no such thing as a "typical" novel of Pushkin or Gogol, for Pushkin and Gogol did not set patterns even for themselves. Some still considered the novel to be a debased form of literature. Others eagerly awaited and encouraged Russian novels, but the possibilities and limitations of content, form, and expression had hardly begun to be explored.
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